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Monday, August 5, 2019

Why Is America Killing Itself? God Knows!

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dallas shooting afterIn the aftermath of the El Paso shooting. (Photo: Ivan Pierre Aguirre)

It's mourning in America again.  Two mass shootings within 24 hours over the weekend—one in Texas and the other in Ohio. The death toll has risen to 31, with dozens more in hospital. 

Murdered Americans lying in the streets mean one thing to too many unprincipled American politicians: A political opportunity. 

Democratic presidential hopeful, Beto O'Rourke, didn't miss a beat.  Hours after the shooting in El Paso, he took it upon himself to unleash a televised tirade against Donald Trump—the “racist” who, according to O'Rourke, is personally responsible for the murder of 20 Americans in El Paso: 

 

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EDITOR'S UPDATE: Since we posted this article yesterday, the following video was taken down from YouTube. It is my hope that this might mean Beto has had a run-in with the Secret Service in the wake of his inflammatory and dangerous rhetoric against the President of the United States.  Here in a nutshell, is what Beto said, as summed up by Patrick Buchanan in his excellent new article "Exploiting Massacres to Raise Poll Ratings":

Railed Beto, Trump "is a racist and he stokes racism in this country ... and it leads to violence. ... We have a president with white nationalist views in the United States today." He called Trump's language about Mexican immigrants "reminiscent of something you might hear in the Third Reich." Asked on Sunday by CNN's Jake Tapper if he believes the president is a "white nationalist," Beto eagerly assented: "Yes, I do."

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If dangerous rhetoric incites violence, one wonders why this dog whistle to every psycho Trump hater with a deer rifle didn't land this irresponsible buffoon in jail. 

I guess anything goes on CNN these days. They've been broadcasting a 24-hour rant against Trump and the NRA ever since the shootings. It’s almost as if this is tailor made for them, since the deranged shooters in both cases were white. They say they care about the victims of gun violence and I'm sure some of them do, but they also seem positively fixated on the skin color of the shooter.

For them, these brutal acts of senseless violence seem to serve a political agenda, which may explain the comparative silence over at CNN when a rash of shootings in Chicago over the very same weekend left 66 shot and 12 dead. 

Do all black lives matter to CNN, or just those taken by white killers?    

Some 260 murders in Chicago so far in 2019, and nothing from CNN or Beto about the rise of hate crimes in the Windy City and how it's all Trump's fault.  Perhaps this is because in the Chicago massacres the black-to-white shooter/victim ratio doesn’t fit their racist narrative.

Regardless, these acts of violence are more than deplorable. And I disagree with President Trump when he suggests mental illness is the problem. Something far worse than any illness of the mind would seem to be at work here, and it has little to do with guns and everything to do with a sickness of the soul.  

mikes pull quote guns

I have been a gun owner and a hunter all my life. I have a permit to carry. I worked as an armed guard for a couple of years out of college and carried a gun to work every day. I believe in the Second Amendment.

That said, guns will not fix the problem, any more than guns are its cause.  

Arming America will not stop the hate and violence any more than disarming America will.

Fifty years ago, everyone had easy access to guns. Young people got them from their parents as gifts at Christmas and birthdays. They were part of our lives, our culture, our way of life—and yet nobody was out shooting up schools or slaughtering innocent people at Wal-Mart. 

Why not?

Well, that’s the question every serious journalist and social commentator should be asking. But they’re not. Why not? Because they’re not allowed to bring even logic into the national conversation, much less God and morality.

Blame the guns. Blame the president. Blame the cops. But never ask the obvious questions: 

Why did gun violence explode onto the national scene only after God and prayer had been banished from public schools? 

Why did gun violence explode into our lives only after abortion was legalized? (In the state of Illinois alone, nearly 40,000 abortions take place every year; that’s an average of over 100 babies per day.)

Ya think there might be a connection between the alarming loss of respect for life on the streets of Chicago and the loss of respect for innocent life in the womb a long time ago? 

Again, don’t ask that question. Half the country will call it hate speech and the other half will dismiss it as the unenlightened babble of the Dark Ages. We're a progressive society. Can't you tell? 

Broken families, war on morality, abortion, ubiquitous pornography, violent video games, violent movies, violent music, banishing God — none of this has anything to do with gun violence in America. Nothing! Nada! And to suggest otherwise is probably against the law or will be soon enough.  

Just blame the guns, play the race card and let's have another Godless moment to silence for the victims, of course.

Sheer insanity! 

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Last modified on Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Michael J. Matt | Editor

Michael J. Matt has been an editor of The Remnant since 1990. Since 1994, he has been the newspaper's editor. A graduate of Christendom College, Michael Matt has written hundreds of articles on the state of the Church and the modern world. He is the host of The Remnant Underground and Remnant TV's The Remnant Forum. He's been U.S. Coordinator for Notre Dame de Chrétienté in Paris--the organization responsible for the Pentecost Pilgrimage to Chartres, France--since 2000.  Mr. Matt has led the U.S. contingent on the Pilgrimage to Chartres for the last 24 years. He is a lecturer for the Roman Forum's Summer Symposium in Gardone Riviera, Italy. He is the author of Christian Fables, Legends of Christmas and Gods of Wasteland (Fifty Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll) and regularly delivers addresses and conferences to Catholic groups about the Mass, home-schooling, and the culture question. Together with his wife, Carol Lynn and their seven children, Mr. Matt currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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